Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

CHAPTER 3
Perception verb complements in English
1. Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a description of PVCs in
English. The structural and semantic characterization of English PVCs
serves as the basis of comparison for the description of PVCs in Akatek
in chapter 5. The description of English PVCs is not exhaustive because
it is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss all properties relevant
to PVCs in English. The theoretical implications and problems that
have been discussed in connection with various properties of English
PVCs are left for the reader to explore in the extensive literature. 1 The
structure of the chapter is as follows.
The introduction provides an overview of the structural and semantic
types (sections 1.1 and 1.2) that were identi ed for the investigation
of PVCs in chapters 1 and 2. Furthermore, the hypotheses regarding
the correlations between structural types of PVC and semantic types
stated in the rst twochapters of this thesis are restated with respect to
English PVCs (section 1.3). In section 2, I investigate di erent PV and
non-PV matrix predicates of the ve PVCtypes and the INOM complement,
which was added to the description of PVC types for means
of comparison. In the next two sections, 3 and 4, structural and semantic
descriptions of the PVC types are presented. In the conclusion
(section 5), I reconsider the hypotheses stated in section 1.3. Based
on the results, I classify the ve di erent PVCtypes in English within
Noonan's typology of complementation (Noonan, 1985), which was
presented in chapter 2. The typology of complementation serves as the
basis for the typology of PVCs that is developed in chapter 6.
1.1. Structural types. In English, there are at least eleven different
PVCtypes (Berman, 1998). Finite complement clauses with
the optional complementizer that, interrogative and adverbial clauses,
full and naked in nitives, present and past participles, AdjPs, PPs,
1 Among others Barwise & Perry (1983); Bolinger (1974); Declerck
(1983); Dretske (1969); Felser (1995); Gee (1975, 1977); Higginbotham
(1994b); Kirsner & Thompson (1976); Mittwoch (1990); Vendler (1967).
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